Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, announced Wednesday that it would lift Donald Trump’s ban “in the coming weeks.” The former president had been banned from both social networks for a little over two years because of the attack on the Capitol and also because of his behavior in the weeks between the presidential election, which he lost to Joe Biden, and on January 6, 2021, a black day for American democracy when a mob of its supporters stormed Congress at the end of one of its rallies in Washington to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power.
“Our belief is that the risk [que representaba Trump] it’s decreased enough,” its president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, said in a post on the meta-blog. “For this reason, we will be reactivating Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts in the coming weeks. We will accompany this decision with new safeguards to prevent him from repeating his behavior.”
Before they closed the door on him, Trump had the account with the most followers on Facebook: 34 million, compared to the 23 he had amassed on Instagram.
He was also fired from Twitter, a platform where he had earned the nickname “Tweeter in Chief” during his presidency, but that club had him reinstated at the end of the year after magnate Elon Musk bought the Social Network. For now, the former president has retired one of his favorite speakers: after being kicked out of Twitter, he launched his own social network, Truth Social. With the latter, he’s tied to an exclusivity deal that obliges him to share his news for at least six hours before doing it elsewhere. Plus, he’s invested in it, and there’s every indication that if he stopped using it the way he used to, the company’s value would sink irretrievably.
“The public should be able to hear what their politicians are saying, the good, the bad and the ugly, so they can make informed decisions in the elections,” said Clegg, who was the UK’s deputy prime minister at the time. he added in his statement by David Cameron at Downing Street on Wednesday. “But that doesn’t mean there aren’t limits to what people can say on our platform. When there is a clear risk of harm in the real world, an intentionally high bar for meta to intervene in public discourse, we act.”
It’s not clear if Trump, who in November announced his third candidacy for the White House in the 2024 election, intends to resume activity on Facebook and Instagram, powerful platforms for spreading his campaign messages. The terms of your exclusive agreement with Truth Social, contained in a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)-registered document, include a caveat for instances where the news is related to fundraising or voting initiatives.
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In Wednesday’s post, Clegg vowed that Meta’s updated protocol is ready to “prevent the kind of risk that happened on Jan. 6.” “We may restrict the distribution of these publications [de contenido peligroso] and if it happens again, we may temporarily limit access to our advertising tools. This move would mean that the content on Trump’s account would remain viewable but would not be distributed to users, including those who follow Trump. We may also remove the share button from such posts and prevent them from being featured or promoted.”
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